Since some on this list think I am a sole proprietor of doom and gloom,
oil-wise, I thought that some stuff from First Break, the journal of the
European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers might be of interest.
Each year they update the discovery rate for certain countries and compare
it with the amount of oil produced. Only a few countries (those with very
little oil production are finding more oil than they produce. Here is the
data

Lest anyone make the mistake of thinking that we will run out of all
production in 60 years because that is what the R/P says, it ain't so. As
the oil in the ground gets less, the production rate will get less

"Estimates of volumes of new hydrocarbon discoveries made in
the year for
the world less North America was almost 9 billion barrels of liquids and 42
trillion ft3 of gas." "Statistics Show 2001 Was No Vintage Year for
Discoveries and Production World-Wide," First Break 20:9 Sep. 2002, p. 537

We produced 26 billion barrels last year but only found 9 billion new
barrels. Not a good thing. And as to the reserve numbers, which Walter
questioned me on last time, I didn't do a great job on that answer. Here
is some more data on that issue:

ýThe members of OPEC have faced an even greater temptation to inflate their
reports because the higher their reserves, the more oil they are allowed to
export. National companies, which have exclusive oil rights in the main OPEC
countries, need not (and do not) release detailed statistics on each field
that could be used to verify the countryÝs total reserves. There is thus
good reason to suspect that when, during the late 1980s, six of the 11 OPEC
nations increased their reserve figures by colossal amounts, ranging from 42
to 197 percent, they did so only to boost their export quotas.ţ
ýPrevious OPEC estimates, inherited from private companies before
governments took them over, had probably been conservative, P90 numbers. So
some upward revision was warranted. But no major new discoveries or
technological breakthroughs justified the addition of a staggering 287 Gbo.
That increase is more than all the oil ever discovered in the U.S.ˇplus 40
percent. Non-OPEC countries, of course, are not above fudging their numbers
either: 59 nations stated in 1997 that their reserves were unchanged from
1996. Because reserves naturally drop as old fields are drained and jump
when new fields are discovered, perfectly stable numbers year after year are
implausible.ţ THE END OF CHEAP OIL by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H.
Laherr╦re,
Scientific American, March 1998